Cities XL 2011

I download this game yesterday and found that it just wouldn't play. Allowed me to activate the product, but when I clicked play, it would say preparing to launch and then ... nothing. Eventvwr showed an 0x000005 error. Cleared out the cache files and downloaded again; same thing.

I then did the usual google search and tried suggested fixes including, reinstall directx 9 and visual C++ 2005 as well as setting the EXE to run as administrator; still nothing.

Then I noticed that many other people with the problem all had Windows 7. So I set the Cities_XL executable to compatibility mode Windows Vista SP2 and now it works perfectly.

As I say, not a perfect fix, but if anyone else is pulling their hair out .......

I also was able to figure out how to fix the crash on startup, although my problem was different. I have Windows 7 64-bit, and always log in with the guest account (in Windows) for increased security.

The .NET framework that is in the Steam directory would not install on a 64 bit machine. I downloaded the latest .NET 4.5 from Microsoft but it still wouldn't work. That's when I realized that perhaps it was the reduced privileges of the guest account that might be causing the problem. Logging in as administrator solved it, and the game started up normally. I tried running the executable from the Steam directory as administrator but it didn't work. I actually had to log off the guest account and log in as administrator on my PC for it to work. I'm not sure what's happening here.

I still haven't played it yet, since I was so happy to get passed this startup bug that I wanted to share. The game must be trying to access some part of the drive that it shouldn't have access to, and the windows guest mode is really strict about that. This is not the first program that I've had this problem with, but it isn't very common. It would be nice not to have to log in as administrator every time I want to play this game.